In the previous article, I introduced you to the AST (Abstract Syntax Tree). This is how PowerShell parses your commands and scripts. Tools like VS Code take advantage of the AST, and you can as well. We explored the results from parsing a simple PowerShell expression. Today, we need to look at parsing a PowerShell script file. This could be a PowerShell script that runs through a series of commands, a script file that defines one or more functions, or even a PowerShell module file.

This time we'll use the ParseFile() method.

[System.Management.Automation.Language.Parser]::ParseFile([string]filePath,[ref]astTokens,[ref]astErrors)

As I did before, I’ll need to initialize variables for the tokens and errors.